Research Abstracts Online
January 2010 - March 2011

PI: Doug Dokken

Warn on Forecast

The "warn on forecast” concept utilizes short-range high-resolution forecasts to provide longer public warning times for severe weather events. This is in contrast to the "warn on detection” concept presently used. This group’s preliminary studies will involve "Truth of Concept” verification of well-documented tornadic events, such as the St. Peter 1998 storm, and try to qualitatively recreate this event from available data. The researchers want to be able to recognize important tornadic features produced by the storm within corresponding time and geographical regions.

The primary numerical weather-modeling tool the researchers use is WRF (Weather Research and Forecast) constantly updated by government and academic researchers and the National Center for Atmospheric Research. In addition we will use ARPS (Advanced Regional Prediction System) and the visualization package Vis5D. The output can be viewed and analyzed to determine processes that are most likely to contribute to tornado formation. The high computational needs of this kind of weather simulation necessitate the use of supercomputing resources.